Culture

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

George Harrison died 13 years ago this month. For nearly a decade before his death, he had been working slowly on a new solo album while dealing with a cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatments, a remission, and then, a new cancer and its eventual metastasization. He was also stabbed 40 times in a house invasion about two years before his death.

So George Harrison’s late 1990s was a period in which the “material world,” as he once called life, appeared to be a genuinely unpleasant place, one that no longer wanted him around, but he retained a sharp wit about it anyway. Asked about his attacker, Harrison said that he “clearly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” (The attacker suffered from untreated schizophrenia and was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.)

Working on his music through all of this, Harrison finished enough tracks to have a rough cut of a full album, but he finally ran into the ultimate deadline when cancer was found in his brain and he was given weeks to live. He wrote out instructions for his son, Dhani, and musical collaborator, Jeff Lynne, and they produced his final work, the album “Brainwashed,” which they released a year after his death, in 2002.

James Boswell reported that Samuel Johnson once said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Many variations of this quip are bouncing around literature, some of which credit Boswell, some Johnson, and some no one. “Death concentrates the mind.” It is one of those sentences that does not beg for an author because it feels like a thought no one would be the first to think.

A music critic, Robert Christgau, used a variation of the phrase in his one-sentence review of “Brainwashed”: “Say this for death—it focuses the mind.” Christgau was no Harrison fan; his review of the triple album, 23-track, “All Things Must Pass” read in part, “He’s never been good for more than two songs per album,” which was a reference to Harrison’s usual Beatles contribution per album. He gave it a C.

He gave “Brainwashed” three stars, though, and one of the songs he cited as noteworthy is “Any Road.” The song’s composition dates to the late ’80s, the last fertile period in Harrison’s career, but he had not recorded it or found it a home until the “Brainwashed” sessions.

Some of Harrison’s songs are written in something like the structure of a joke, with the chorus serving as a punchline to a set-up, a reply to the ideas contained in the verses. “Any Road” uses that technique; the line, “If you don’t know where you’re going,/Any road will take you there” feels almost-deep but it winks at knowing that it isn’t deep at all. It, too, is a sentence that does not beg for an author because it feels like a thought no one would be the first to utter. In fact, the Cheshire Cat says something like it to Alice.

The first verse and several after begin with the word “But,” which implies that the singer is replying to someone, something. There is another side to the conversation, but we do not get to hear it; the singer is grateful for the many-roaded ride thus far, and is neither asking for more parts to the journey nor turning down any more rides on any more roads.

Which isn’t deep at all and contains an entire life at the same time. A real Cheshire Cat trick.

Any Road, George Harrison
(Give me that plenty of that guitar.)

But I’ve been traveling on a boat and a plane
In a car on a bike with a bus and a train
Traveling there, traveling here
Everywhere in every gear

But oh Lord we pay the price
With the spin of the wheel with the roll of the dice
Ah yeah you pay your fare
And if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there

And I’ve been traveling through the dirt and the grime
From the past to the future through the space and the time
Traveling deep beneath the waves
In watery grottoes and mountainous caves

But oh Lord we’ve got to fight
With the thoughts in the head with the dark and the light
No use to stop and stare
And if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there

You may not know where you came from
May not know who you are
May not have even wondered
How you got this far

I’ve been traveling on a wing and a prayer
By the skin of my teeth, by the breadth of a hair
Traveling where the four winds blow
With the sun on my face, in the ice and the snow

But oooeeee it’s a game
Sometimes you’re cool, sometimes you’re lame
Ah yeah it’s somewhere
And if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there

But oh Lord we pay the price
With the spin of the wheel with the roll of the dice
Ah yeah you pay your fare
And if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there

I keep traveling around the bend
There was no beginning, there is no end
It wasn’t born and never dies
There are no edges, there is no sides

Oh yeah you just don’t win
It’s so far out, the way out is in
Bow to God and call him Sir
But if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there
And if you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there
If you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 5 asks, “You’re asked to recite a poem (or song lyrics) from memory—what’s the first one that comes to mind? Does it have a special meaning, or is there another reason it has stayed, intact, in your mind?”

May 13’s “Occupy Daily Prompt” is titled, “They’re Talkin’ ‘Bout Me,” and offers the George Harrison quote as a topic. I wrote about it in November.

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A Shade of Failure: A Literary Rivalry

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The term schadenfreude literally means damage-joy. When one enjoys hearing that a rival is encountering trouble, one is experiencing a sense of schadenfreude. Most of us have experienced this feeling at some point in our lives, but most of us also have been jerks at some point in our lives, and the two sometimes come at the same time.

There is no real-world term for its opposite, so some people have begun to use a made-up word, freudenschade, to describe the distress one feels when a friend or rival is doing well or has had a success. (One friend recently told me about feeling jealous when they heard that I was publishing this blog right here. “Why does he get to do that?” the friend said that they thought about my writing. Now, this friend also has time to spend on a similar project, but was not. Is not. “Jealous” was the word used.)

gore-vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal hated a lot of people, and even appeared to take pleasure at his rivals’ distress at his success. He had feelings of schadenfreude over other writers’ freudenschade. (That is as hard to type as it is to say.) Truman Capote was one of his top three hated individuals. Vidal’s mother was number one and Robert Kennedy was probably second, because Kennedy hated him first, seemingly without cause (JFK appeared to enjoy Vidal’s company more than his brother’s), and without end. But Capote …

capote

Truman Capote

Truman Capote was American literature’s lost boy, at least for his generation. He was not the first nor will he be the last, but not many lost souls stick around for as long as he did. His entire published output in life is small, six books, none long, one of which is a novella, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and another is “In Cold Blood,” which is based on a true story. “In Cold Blood” was published in 1966 and was not followed by anything until 1980 when he published a collection of fragments. He died in 1984, aged 59, and his literary executors discovered that the novel he had been promising for years, for which he had been accepting and returning advances with a clock-like regularity, was nothing more than some more sketches and fragments and journal entries and verbal doodles, which they published anyway. It did his reputation more damage than he ever did.

Drugs and alcohol and a need for immediate feedback, which writing long pieces and books does not often provide, produced the sorry sight of a man, unpublished for the last two decades of his life, appearing on TV talk shows in different states of inebriation. He had earned a deserved reputation as a promising young writer in his early 20s, which brought him acclaim and invitations to parties and TV talk show panels. The discovery that he preferred live applause given for a well-told story and loved drinking more than writing was his undoing. Incapable of sitting with himself, a condition many addicts may recognize in themselves, he would sit next to Johnny Carson and slur his way through anecdotes that never sounded truthful and, even better, never were true. The fun would follow in the form of lawsuits.

Vidal and Capote were about the same age (Capote was born in 1924 and Vidal in 1925), had their first novels published at a great young age (Vidal 21, Capote 24), and had a rivalry thrust upon them by the media. Both enjoyed celebrity, but Vidal appeared to enjoy sitting with himself and producing work as much or even more. He seemed to view media appearances and celebrity as a reward for doing the work.

Both knew failure and setbacks. There is a famous quote attributed to Capote, “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” Being a boy-wonder who fought to remain in the public’s consciousness as still a boy, still a wonder, even into his 50s, Capote’s “success” was of a certain kind, as a person with a famous reputation who felt success(ful) only when a live audience would applaud him as a “writer,” even though he was not writing at all, not in front of them, not when he went home after. Who knows what flavor that condiment brought him?

Vidal was born to a prominent but not wealthy family. He remained unimpressed by fame or prestige, even while being a name-dropper extraordinaire. Capote made up stories to make himself appear intimate with the famous; Vidal crafted ways to distance himself from the important, usually by revealing truths, by name, in his work. Capote was born and raised in poverty. In one of his less kind quotes about his almost rival, Vidal declared, “Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of.”

Some near-kindness for Capote’s ghost, his shade, came out of Vidal long after Capote’s death. In his memoir “Palimpsest,” Vidal re-quotes himself (why take a pass on the opportunity?) and says that he said the above line (about getting in and out of the world of prestige), “unctuously.” He goes on,

Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing pet who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip abut them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real thing, as [he learned].

It is a moment of sympathy, almost of empathy, and it is quickly forgotten in Vidal’s book; in the few sentences in which Capote’s name appears elsewhere, the words “lie” or “liar” are always nearby. If failure is a condiment, schadenfreude is salt, plain and delicious.

The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 4 asks, “If ‘failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor’ (Truman Capote), how spicy do you like your success stories?”

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Time and Dr. Johnson

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Samuel Johnson wrote, “He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.”—Rambler 108, March 30, 1751

Dr. Johnson was 41 in March of 1751 and several years into his work on his most lasting project, his Dictionary. Unlike most of the dictionaries developed for any language, and all dictionaries in English, Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” was written by one man. An entire dictionary, with more than 40,000 word entries and over 100,000 literary quotations to back up and explain Johnson’s definitions and create an etymology (the study of the origin of words). It took Johnson nine years to complete it; 75 years later, Noah Webster published his own dictionary, which had 70,000 entries, took 25 years to complete, and cites Johnson throughout. The first completed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took 75 years and dozens of scholars to compile its first edition, published in 1928.

Johnson’s Dictionary is not the best one written for or in the English language—the dictionary that sits forgotten on your shelf is probably named Webster and not Johnson, and the website that you use instead of a book is also not named “Johnson.com” or something like that. Johnson’s definitions are often complete sentences and are sometimes essays on the topic inspired by the word under consideration. His treatment of the word “time,” for instance, offers fourteen different meanings for the word: “1. The measure of duration. 2. Space of time. 3. Interval. 4. Season; proper time. 5. A considerable space of duration; continuance; process of time. 6. Age; particular part of time. 7. Past time. 8. Early time. 9. Time considered as affording opportunity. 10. Particular quality of the present. 11. Particular time. 12. Hour of childbirth. 13. Repetition of any thing, or mention with reference to repetition. 14. Musical measure.” (“Time,” Johnson’s Dictionary)

Johnson offers a quote from English literature, usually the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, or Dryden, as a pertinent example for each particular definition. Sometimes he offers as many as seven quotes. For his fourteen definitions of “Time,” he uses forty-six quotes.

Samuel_Johnson

Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

This project would be difficult enough to produce in our era of desktop publishing (is there an app for dictionary creation?); Johnson put together his Dictionary in his house, with workmen appearing every so often to assemble a printing press and run off some pages. He paid them out of his own pocket. His personal library, large but not comprehensive, was supplemented by books borrowed from friends. The books were so covered with his markings that they were not worth being returned, the friends remembered.

It took him nine years to complete the Dictionary, yet he had promised it in three. For the rest of his career, Johnson was ridiculed as a slow worker; he proposed to work up an edition of Shakespeare’s plays (the first ever single source, authoritative edition that would be created) in 1756 and started attracting subscribers, but by 1762 another writer took a public jibe at him: “He for subscribers baits his hook/and takes your cash, but where’s the book?” His Shakespeare was published in 1765.

While working on his Dictionary, he published a self-written, twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler, to earn a living. (In other words, he wrote a blog while working on his big project.) Then, while working on his edition of Shakespeare, he published a weekly blog, um, magazine, called The Idler.

Samuel Johnson visited the topic of time over a dozen times in those two journals, and perhaps for understandable reasons: For someone so productive and yet considered a slow worker (The Idler was so named as a joke about his avoiding the long slow work on his Shakespeare), it is likely that few writers had considered time in so many facets. Any waking hour not spent earning a living was indeed “a particle of time (dropped) useless to the ground.”

Johnson had many health issues, ranging from regular bouts with a bleak depression, which he was the first to name the “black dog”; nearsightedness that glasses did not aid (or vanity made him avoid them); a disfiguring skin condition; and Tourette syndrome, a condition that did not have a name until the late 1800s and was not considered a medical condition in Johnson’s lifetime. The tics made him seem an odd character, and he felt he had to win people over with his wit. (Asked once why he made noises, he said it was a bad habit.) His many tics and violent gesticulations are described in every contemporary account about him written by his friends, so the posthumous diagnosis seems a trustworthy one.

A year and a half before his death, he described time and its slowness in old age thus:

The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. … When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, […] After dinner, what remains but to count the clock, and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect. Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this?

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for February 25 asks, “If you could slow down an action that usually zooms by, or speed up an event that normally drags on, which would you choose, and why?”

The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 1 asks, “If you could slow down an action that usually zooms by, or speed up an event that normally drags on, which would you choose, and why?”

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